Ancestry

It's a safe bet that you should always start with the United States census when you're beginning the search for an American ancestor. The federal census, which actually was first taken in our young Republic in 1790 and then every ten years after that, can give you the nuts and bolts you need to start a more extensive search.

These may be heady questions, but now that we're 15 years into the 21st Century--yes, that's a jawdropper when you think about it--and the future has, basically, arrived, ironically, we find ourselves in the midst of another phenomena: Looking back into the past.

Discovering an ancestor's elusive Irish birthplace is a big deal for genealogists. On what we might think of as "the scale of genealogical difficulty," tracing Irish roots is right there near the top of the list.

An adopted person can -- sometimes -- be fortunate enough to find the identity of their biological mother and father through one of the major commercial DNA tests available today. And they can potentially learn quite a lot from it.

Back in 2009, I traced the then-new First Lady's family tree back four or five generations on all branches, but of all the ancestors I uncovered, it was a great-great-great-grandmother named Melvina Shields McGruder who captured my attention.

Colicchio's family includes a total of 12 immigrants -- eight of whom came through Ellis Island, three more who entered via New York earlier (one just four months prior to its opening), and a solitary ancestor who opted for Philadelphia.

Where do you start piecing together your ancestor's experiences in World War II? Military service records can be a remarkably rich source of information, full of intricate insights and surprising details about the life of your own veteran relative.

Every few years I get the urge to dabble in genealogy. And every few years it gets a little easier. In the early 90's it was Family Tree Maker, replete with multiple floppy disks. Ship manifests and census were just becoming available digitally. Not for the faint of heart.

Working with a team of geneticists, bioinformaticists, statisticians and data scientists who study these patterns, we're exploring the genetic backgrounds of people with long standing documented histories in a variety of regions around the world.

There's been quite a fuss about a nationalistic, Russian beer commercial David Duchovny made not long ago -- especially given that he recently discovered that his roots are actually in Ukraine. For obvious reasons, this is less than ideal timing.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand changed the world more dramatically than any other assassination in modern history. Similarly, the death of little Stanley Wallenstein on June 28, 1914 had a direct impact on my family.

The results of my DNA analysis arrived in the mail a few weeks later. What a surprise! I had no idea where the Sub-Saharan African part came from, but that meant that I had a black ancestor somewhere about five generations back.

With my mother at a solid 5-percent black, that makes me at least 2.5-percent black. It may not sound like much, but if I were milk, I certainly wouldn't qualify as skim. I'm closer to low-fat. And as a gay man, I like the sound of that. Being black just feels so right.